


the ashes in our wake

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: F/M, Post-War, i'd pretend i wasn't writing a redemption arc fic but i'd be lying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 08:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: It figures that Quistis Trepe would be the one to come after him, when it's all over. Seifer/Quistis, and their damages.





	the ashes in our wake

_ Make up your mind, ‘cause it’s now or never. _

In a gray hell, Seifer Almasy stares into the abyss. The abyss gazes back, cloudy and feral-toothed; it will devour him the second he jumps, he thinks. But if he doesn’t jump, if he stays here, he’ll die alone and afraid. 

_ That  _ makes the decision for him; black leather cracking boots take three strides back from the edge, the steel of one toe glinting silver in what little light remains here. He slings Hyperion into its sheath, feeling it slide home in the snug leather, anchored in place as best as it can be. Shakes his hands out, stretching nervous (eager) fingers in their dark gloves. His coat swirls its torn-ragged hem around his feet with a couple of jumps, feeling too much like Dincht for a split second, the irritation that follows sticking around a moment more. 

_ C’mon, you bastard. It’s just a leap into the unknown. You’ve done dumber things.  _

Seifer wets his lips, cracked and dry in the sterile heat of this place. Inhales, exhales, kicks up gray dust in his short run, and sends himself flying into darkness.

It yawns open for him, a cold embrace welcoming him home, to the hell he’s been condemned to find since the day he was born. He falls for a long time, an eternity, and has hours to realize his mistake, that falling forever is just as bad as staying in the gray known, the expanse memorized, stinking of time magic,  _ kompression _ . 

_ She’s here, she’s here, she’s here _ , Ultimecia in his mother’s person-suit, ill-fitting skin, and that’s going to be a whole barrel of issues they’re gonna have to work out once he hits solid ground again, isn’t it? If she isn’t dead. 

_ Please don’t let her be dead _ . 

He’s killed so many people in the last-- how long has it even been? Weeks, months? It feels like it’s been years. He can't deal with another body in that count. 

Seifer falls, and runs his hands through the darkness, trying to scoop something tangible from it, a souvenir of his travels, a star, dust from one. A memory. Anything.  _ Something _ . 

His fingers close, and there’s something tangible between them, the contact so sudden that he almost releases it on instinct, drawing it out of the black and close to his face, the sparking of a fire spell enough to light up the object. 

He’s plucked out a feather, white and downy and bloody at the end, as if it was wrenched from a bird’s wing, or an angel’s. It slips from between his grasp in a sudden gust of wind, the fire goes out, and Seifer has enough time to mourn the passing of both light and object before the darkness undergoes a rapid shift, brightening foot by foot, until he’s sure he isn’t hallucinating it and he’s really plummeting through daylight, and there’s something grassy green beneath him, with a blue streak cutting across its middle like liquid sky. 

“Oh,  _ shit-- _ ” 

He tucks his head and loosens his limbs, bracing himself for an impact that is broken by a convenient river, freezing cold. The shock of the water alights every single nerve in his body; Seifer can’t breathe from the force of the landing and the ice that has suddenly replaced his lungs. It’s good that he can’t, anyway, because he keeps going down from his own weight and the height of his descent, until his feet slam into the clay-silt bed, kicking up swirls of reddish gray in the water all around him. He pushes off again, scrambling back up toward the sun, soaked blonde hair cresting the water like a small atomic flash; he inhales great, sucking mouthfuls of air until his equilibrium returns, and fumbles across his shoulder to feel Hyperion’s hilt right where he’d left it, the weight of the gunblade reassuring across his spine, waterlogged as the case is. Whatever bullets he’s got left are a lost cause, but he’s not worried about that-- he’s never really worried about ammunition. 

Seifer swims for shore, broad strokes cutting through the current before it can sweep him away to more parts unknown, and eventually he can stand, and walk, and drags himself up onto a rocky river’s edge, lying prone in the dirt and mud, fingers digging into piles of it to serve as an anchor.

He gives himself what feels like twenty minutes of rest-- his watch had gotten smashed in combat long ago. Time is relative, anyway, isn’t it? 

The thought makes him laugh; Seifer has to roll onto his back, facing the sky dappled with trees that sway and bend in a natural breeze, so that he doesn’t choke on the mud with his wheezing. Time is relative, and time is a  _ bitch _ . 

He’s safe. 

He’s free. 

A hand comes up toward the sky, even though there’s no castle to aim the extended middle finger at. It makes him feel better, if nothing else. 

“Fuck  _ you _ ,” he exhales, the laughter loosening all the muscles in his body, leaving an ache, along with the sense that maybe he’s finally gone straight off the deep end. 

Yeah, probably, but giving Ultimecia the bird definitely makes him  _ feel _ better. 

Eventually, Seifer forces himself upright, drawing all six-foot-two of him to unsteady, numb feet, the sun doing its best to dry him out, but not succeeding all that well until he removes Hyperion’s sheath to shuck off the coat beneath it. 

The coat is destroyed, when he finally gets a good look at it, shaken out and held in gloved hands. There’s no coming back from where it’s been. He uses the switchblade he digs out of one inner pocket, the only thing worth keeping, to cut through the stitching holding one of the crimson leather crosses on, and pockets that. The rest of the coat is left slung over a low-hanging branch, left behind. 

Eventually, his gloves come off, too, stuffed into a pants pocket. His hands are unnaturally pale compared to the rest of his arms, dark leather designed to prevent Hyperion from destroying his hands any further than it has. He turns them over again and again, stopped for a long time in a copse of trees, eyeing his scarred fingers and calloused palms with suspicion, like they have betrayed him in some deep, unspeakable way.

Distantly, something laughs, a familiar, maniacal cackling, and he draws his blade out of sudden gut reflex, whirling toward the sound. 

“Who’s there?” Demanded to the forest as a whole, to the source of the noise. Something shakes a bush at his three-o’clock, and a blue-crested bird takes flight, its screech the same laughing sound. It’s a goddamned  _ catbird _ . 

He lets his sword arm fall, Hyperion’s tip digging a rent into the forest floor, and rakes his left hand through his hair, trying to regain some sort of calm. There’s nothing to be found. 

\--

Quistis Trepe has had six weeks to recover from the effects of a (by all supervisory accounts) successful war, and her escape from a failed compression of all points of time, both linear and non, and she thinks that if she spends  _ one more second  _ inside the walls of Garden, she is going to lose her mind for real. 

Six weeks is not enough time for anyone to bounce back from something like what they’ve all been through, gasping and bleeding and damaged in irrevocable ways-- she sits through mandated de-escalation therapy with Dr. Kadowaki three times a week, eats the prescribed diet to gain back her strength and sleeping habits, but the former is an easy rebound with regular training, three squares a day, and the latter was always shot to hell. 

She cashes in some vacation time instead, a month of it that she terms a loose sabbatical, picking her destination at random from a map. Timber. Where it all started. This seems appropriate. Quistis boards a train in civilian clothes, her destination logged with the appropriate parties and Xu. It is a relief, the further away she gets from rules and orders and debriefings, war pay padding her bank account beyond Quistis’ wildest expectations. 

She has money and time, the SeeD car at her disposal, with only one other person in there when Quistis steps through the door, a quiet man with headphones in and his face buried in what she surmises is a mission briefing, with its familiar red-edged manila cover. Neither of them speak beyond a brief nod of acknowledgement, and she takes a seat on the far side of the car, so not to disturb him. 

Being somewhere quiet and green will do her good, she thinks, especially since Galbadian troops have withdrawn from the Trabian province, as part of the immediate ceasefire between Balamb and Galbadia Garden. If nothing else, she’ll be able to catch up on her reading, which is exactly what she intends to do as the train pulls out from the station. 

Her book is in her hands, open to its first page. It stays there as she stares out the window, thumb breaking the spine of the novel in her distraction. The young man eventually disembarks at Deling City, offering her a brief salute and a polite, “Ma’am,” but doesn’t stick around for a reply. SeeDs always have somewhere more important to be, and she’s actually grateful that he doesn’t make more of a fuss about being in the same car with her after everything that has transpired. Quistis isn’t one built for fame-- her SeeD notoriety is something else. 

Being a  _ known person _ unsettles her. Her eyes pull away from the window, back down to the book. 

She makes it to page fifteen by the time the train pulls into Timber’s station, marking her page by dog-earing a corner. The book goes into her bag, her navy blue duffel’s carefully patched strap goes over her shoulder. She disembarks with no fanfare, and feels better to be on steady, stable ground. 

The train has become almost a comfort, but after running from place to place to place for a year, she’s learned to like the destination far more than the act of getting there. 

It doesn’t take long to walk to the hotel-- it’s less than a mile from the station, and her shoes today are sensible sneakers, much more forgiving than her Garden-issue boots. The room is very pleasant, comfortable and airy, windows sliding open easily with a touch. She bounces on the edge of the queen-sized bed, satisfied with how soft it is, how the covers feel beneath her palms, freshly manicured nails (courtesy of Xu, who, contrary to all of her sharp and cruel edges, can read Quistis better than anyone on the planet can) digging into the sheets briefly, and letting go. 

Outside, a car backfires. She freezes, and reaches for a whip that isn’t at the hip of her pretty floral sundress. 

Quistis leaves the room, the strap of her purse high up on her shoulder, and runs for the safety of the trees. 

\--

The woods eventually give way to more well-tended paths. He walks a long, long time, and thinks that he might never be free of the trees, until footsteps crash down the path, and someone slams into him headlong, a tackle that only a SeeD is capable of, and his nerves are on red alert-- this is it, this is the end of his safety, and Garden has finally come for him. 

He grabs a slender throat blindly even as his back slams into the wood-chip path, turning, pinning, strangling-- 

Nails come up, digging into his arms, renting sharp lines in his skin; Seifer feels the magic boil up, welling in his palms before he can stop it. 

She beats him to it, Thundara’s thousand-watt voltage overwhelming his fire spell. He drops like a stone, and in the split second before the convulsions set in, Quistis’ bright blue eyes swim in front of him, a look of horror that he might have been hallucinating on her face. 

It figures that she’d be the one to come chase him down. 


End file.
